With reason on our side

Dean Malkiel's email to the student body touched off a firestorm last week.

You had to admire the reasoned tone and explanation of the dean's proposal, as if students could read the plan to limit the percentages of A grades granted by each department dispassionately, ignoring the fact that it was their own academic records in question.

Students react to proposals to systematically lower grades in the same way they would to plans to raise the drinking age or assign more reading in every class: badly. Hours after the Dean's email went out, grade inflation was the talk of campus, our collective passions aroused by the prospect of falling GPA's.

But our opposition to the proposed grade inflation fix is not just based on our intense fear of being edged out of the last spot at law school or the final offer from a prominent consulting firm. It gets to the heart of why we have grades in the first place.

Everyone who has weighed in on the grade inflation issue concedes that students at Princeton are talented and qualified to undertake the academic pursuits set for us in our classes. So why have grades at all?

The University identifies three primary purposes for grading its students. The first is educational, to give students "accurate signals about the quality of their work" and to encourage them to achieve to the best of their abilities. Additionally, grading serves as a signal to the public as to the merits of particular students and as an indicator to the administration as to which students are in academic trouble.

None of these purposes is consistent with the new proposal, which limits the percentage of A's that can be handed out by a given department to thirty five percent. Grades should be qualitative, not relative. If forty five percent of students in a department are doing A quality work, surely it does not send an accurate signal to give ten percent of them B's in order to meet an arbitrary quota.

The real problem the University is trying to solve, it seems to me, is quite different.

The dean's proposal talks about the need to differentiate between merely good and outstanding performances and extols the value of carefully considered grades and feedback. These are important goals, but the solution proposed will not achieve them.

Professors and preceptors should be encouraged to read papers carefully, give comments, and be discriminating. Too often, educators hand out high grades without providing this kind of guidance. That is a problem worth addressing, but asking those same people to artificially limit the number of high grades they give out does not mean they will suddenly embrace more intensive and helpful grading practices. It just means some of the indiscriminate grading they do will be lower. Such a change is only superficially superior.

In my favorite class last semester, I labored over my term paper for days. In grading it, my professor left hardly a line without comments, suggestions for further research, criticisms of arguments I'd failed to address. Though I did not do as well as I had hoped, it was the most valuable evaluative experience I'd had in my studies at Princeton, and I managed to have it even in the inflated environment that seems to terrify our administrators.

Discussion about the proposal has focused on grade deflation as its own end. Dean Malkiel writes that Princeton will be a leader among Ivy League schools in tackling the problem. Students question whether employers and graduate schools will understand how our system works.

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All of these concerns miss the point. If we have grades to reflect our talents and aid in the learning process, we ought to be looking at the proposal with a more critical eye, questioning the basic premises on which it is founded.

As students, our gut reaction is to be opposed to the University's plans. In this case, we also have reason on our side. Katherine Reilly is a Wilson School major from Short Hills, N.J. Her column runs on alternate Fridays. She can be reached at kcreilly@princeton.edu.